Christian Bertermann

Overview
Christian Bertermann is a German entrepreneur and co-founder and chief executive officer of AUTO1 Group SE, the Berlin-headquartered digital automotive platform he built with Hakan Koc. Founded in Berlin in 2012, AUTO1 Group operates the wirkaufendeinauto.de trade-in brand, the AUTO1.com wholesale marketplace for dealers, and the Autohero online used-car retail brand, and the company went public on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in February 2021. Bertermann remains AUTO1 Group's chief executive, with Koc now chairing the company's supervisory board.

Why Christian Bertermann matters
AUTO1 Group is one of the largest and longest-running technology companies to emerge from Berlin's startup scene, and Bertermann has led it continuously from founding through its transition to a publicly listed company. The AUTO1 story is frequently cited in DACH startup-ecosystem coverage as an example of a capital-intensive, operationally complex marketplace business scaling to public-market size out of Germany, distinct from the software- and app-led unicorns more commonly associated with Berlin.

Career
Public company-officer records (Bloomberg, MarketScreener) list Bertermann's full name as Christian David Karl Bertermann. He co-founded AUTO1 Group with Hakan Koc in 2012 and has served as chief executive since. Public profiles (Crunchbase, The Org) describe him as a co-founder and CEO with a background as an entrepreneur prior to AUTO1; Startuprad.io has not independently verified the specifics of his pre-AUTO1 career history and hedges accordingly pending direct, on-record confirmation.

Role in the ecosystem
As CEO of a Frankfurt-listed company, Bertermann sits among a small group of DACH founders who have taken a Berlin-founded startup through to a public listing while remaining in the operating CEO seat. AUTO1 Group's scale, multi-country vehicle sourcing, wholesale auction technology, and its own logistics network, makes it a reference point in discussions of European marketplace and mobility-adjacent business models.

Selected relationships
Bertermann's most material professional relationship is his co-founder partnership with https://www.startuprad.io/entities/hakan-koc , with whom he built AUTO1 Group from its 2012 founding; Koc left day-to-day management to chair AUTO1 Group's supervisory board while Bertermann continued as CEO. AUTO1 Group's broader corporate profile, including its brands and investor base, is covered on Startuprad.io's https://www.startuprad.io/entities/auto1-group entity record.

Startuprad.io relevance
Startuprad.io has covered AUTO1 Group's public-market milestones, including its 2021 Frankfurt IPO, as part of its ongoing DACH startup and scale-up coverage. Bertermann's entity record exists to give the AUTO1 Group profile a named, linkable executive counterpart, consistent with Startuprad.io's practice of pairing company records with the founders and executives who built them.

Public source context
This record draws on Startuprad.io's own prior coverage, AUTO1 Group's public company disclosures and investor-relations materials, and third-party business-data profiles (Crunchbase, The Org, Bloomberg, MarketScreener). Where a detail appears on only one of these sources and has not been corroborated elsewhere, it is presented as reported rather than independently confirmed.

Startuprad.io coverage

Auto1 IPO soars 45% and generates Germany's newest Tech Billionaires
Published: 15 March 2026
Last updated: 20 September 2026
Coverage type: News
https://www.startuprad.io/post/auto1-ipo-soars-45-and-generates-germany-s-newest-tech-billionaires

Auto1 IPO soars 45% and generates Germany's newest Tech Billionaires (Updated)
Published: 04 February 2021
Last updated: 20 September 2026
Coverage type: News
https://www.startuprad.io/post/auto1-ipo-soars-45-and-generates-germany-s-newest-tech-billionaires-updated

There is more to this story
For Entrepreneurs Vault members, I go one level deeper: what AUTO1 Group's post-IPO ownership and governance structure looks like today, and what that implies for how founder-led control persists, or does not, after a marketplace business goes public.
We look at AUTO1's shift from founder-CEO-and-co-founder-chair governance to a public-market ownership base, why that pattern recurs across DACH scale-ups, and what that means for founders and investors.
The full Entrepreneurs Vault analysis is available to members.
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